No, Black Men Are Not Inherently More Violent

The risks of using correlational data to support "systemic racism" narratives is the same data can be flipped to support biological essentialism arguments as well

Image from ABC News

By

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

(This post appeared originally on Professor Ferguson’s Substack).

It’s difficult to imagine many topics more rancorous to discuss than whether racial differences are inherent or due to social circumstances.  For the past few decades, it has been very close to taboo to speak out loud that population genetics may result in appreciable and set differences between population groups.  Ironically, the neuroses around race that boiled to the surface in 2020 seems to have broken much of that taboo.  This can have good consequences, allowing us to address difficult topics more rigorously, and potentially bad, as taboos against explicit racism may lessen.

I’m willing to allow others to sort out other messy topics such as IQ, but for the past few years I’ve coauthored a number of studies examining race, policing, and violent crime.  Although most people, of all ethnicities, are interested in good, rigorous evidence, I’ve noted that set opinions on both sides may impede more nuanced evidence.  We may observe that, on one hand, there is a critical social justice or “woke” left who often appear unable to utter aloud the basic well-established fact that young black (and American Indian) men in the US, commit disproportionally high amounts of violent crime.  On the other hand, and ignoring explicit racists as charlatans, there are biological essentialists who aren’t necessarily racists, but believe biology and genetics determines racial differences in violent crime.  Or put another way, biology is destiny and black and American Indian men are genetically predisposed to violence.

Relating to getting “canceled”, I tend to worry more about reactions from the critical social justice folks for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment, but ironically my most recent (and mild) online scrum was with the biological essentialists.  You see, most of the research I’ve conducted finds that, once you control for other community factors ranging from ecological contaminants to mental health to poor social environment, race is no longer a predictor of violent crime.  Sure, race and poverty tend to correlate, but the experience of a poor, mentally ill, white man and a poor, mentally ill, black man aren’t all that different.  Some folks who I’d assume are biological essentialists found this difficult to believe and pointed toward some evidence to the contrary which I’d like to examine.

First, a little throat clearing.  I’m hardly what some might call “woke”, as some of my other research has found that, for instance, race doesn’t predict police misconduct either, contrary to the 2020 narrative (once again, it’s mostly class), and the US criminal justice system is basically egalitarian when it comes to race and sentencing/adjudication.  Second, although I’m sensitive to concerns about misusing science for racist causes, a legitimate apprehension, I don’t believe in scientific censorship or pressuring scholars not to ask uncomfortable questions (after all…we keep getting told we should have uncomfortable discussions about race).  In particular, efforts to ruin the careers of academics who’ve gone off-message on the issue of race has been an embarrassment to science.

That all out of the way, on one hand, I think arguments stemming from population genetics are plausible, yet I am unconvinced the evidence suggests race has any kind of biological determining factor as relates to violent crime.  During the online scrum over some of my past research, biological essentialists pointed toward some interesting data.  One of the most central suggests that black men (but not women) continue to be arrested for violent crimes even in higher income brackets where poverty isn’t a likely explanation.  You can read New York Times coverage of that data here, although the original and much, much denser to the point of impenetrability research study is here.

Ironically, this data was published in order to argue that systemic racism continues to impact black men’s (though for some reason, not black women’s) outcomes.  Biological essentialists, however, argue this could be interpreted instead as some inherent difference between black men and men from other ethnicities.  This is always the danger of correlational data…it’s often open to multiple interpretations, as is the case here.

Despite the glib portrayal in the NYT, the original report is very long, over 100 pages, all inclusive.  Overall, I didn’t find it entirely convincing.  For one thing, the authors try to measure racial bias in neighborhoods using questionable tools, particularly the largely discredited Implicit Association Task (IAT), and the Racial Animus Index (RAI), largely focused on google searches for racial epithets.  The IAT is all but useless, and I don’t find the RAI very impressive either, as it doesn’t help us understand why such words are searched for (including, perhaps, looking up music titles.) 

Overall, I found their analyses to be dense and needlessly complex, which tends to raise a red flag for me.  More critically, the report appears to raise an alternate explanation from either systemic racism or biological essentialism: the absence of fathers.  In the report, fatherlessness appears to explain lower outcomes, and as they acknowledge in a follow up Q&A in the NYT: “The researchers found that the neighborhoods where poor black boys did well, and as well as their white peers, shared three factors: less discrimination, low poverty rates and, among low-income black families, a larger share of fathers present. (The fathers might serve as role models, or they could be a sign that these neighborhoods have other qualities that benefit families, like job opportunities and low incarceration.”   

Thus, whether one is inclined to interpret the data as indicative of systemic racism or inherent biological differences, fatherlessness remains at least a viable third explanation.  The systemic racism argument has a further flaw: why these problems affect only black boys and not black girls.  For the biological essentialism argument, it’s plausible that recessive issues on the X chromosome (boys having only 1) could explain differences in outcome.  Similarly, male role models may be more critical for boys than girls.  So, though knee-jerk, I think the “racism” argument for this data is particularly weak but sells more NYT subscriptions.

Some have raised the potential that differences in androgen exposure in utero may explain differences in criminal behavior between racial groups.  At present, the evidence feels preliminary to me.  I don’t condemn anyone for pursuing high-quality research, however unpalatable the hypothesis may be, but my impression is that there is not definitive proof for such a hypothesis at the moment.

I also worry that there may be an element of presentism in the current argument.  It’s true that there are racial disparities in the commission of crime in the US and other industrialized nations at the present historical moment.  But rough estimates suggest that Europe and the US have benefitted from a massive decline from historical homicide rates.  A read of history suggests that no culture has been immune from horrible violence, whether that be banditry or murder of spouses, to inter-male aggression. 

What we do know is that, in the United States, young black and American Indian men commit more violent crimes than other ethnicities.  Making it taboo to say the truth is not going to help black or American Indian communities who have to deal with the consequences of this.  Observing higher crime rates in these communities does not mean the majority of black or American Indian citizens are involved in violent crime.  Nor should this observation be used to support racist, or prejudiced beliefs or policies directed specifically at these communities.  Policy should target crime not ethnicity.

Here I think is where the social justice left has done considerable damage.  In seeking to ruin the reputations of scholars who produce research that is even modestly off-message with the approved morality tale, activists indulge their own self-esteem at the cost of real victims of homicide and other violent crimes.  It’s no secret that most scholars are liberal or progressive and that may be even more true for scholars who decide to study race issues.  Thus, the social pressure for scholars to confirm progressive ideologies is enormous.  Unfortunately, this has a distorting effect on science and, I’d argue, has made academia almost entirely ineffective at elucidating issues related to race for policy makers and the general public.

That said, both the “systematic racism” and biological essentialism arguments have gotten out over their skis regarding the surety of their beliefs.  Fatherlessness represents at least a third plausible hypothesis.  And fatherlessness has soared in recent decades particularly among black families.  Policies that address this by encouraging nuclear families are at least worth exploring.

As with all things, more and better data are required.  Researchers need to be honest that they are under social pressure to find the “politically correct” results and grapple with this.  Preregistered research designs (where researchers publish their methodology and data analysis plans in advance of data collection to reduce researchers torturing their data to get particular outcomes) may help.  I suspect, in the end, we’ll all have to deal with the likelihood that reality will be messy and fit poorly with any parable we wish to tell.

But reducing victimization due to crime, particularly in the communities that experience it the most, is worth an honest effort.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read History is complicated. Let's teach the complexity

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